Who are the terrorists?

Three days ago Amos Harel, a
correspondent for the increasingly right-wing Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, wrote an article that included
the following: 'Israel says about
two-thirds of the Palestinians who were killed in the Gaza fighting
were members of terror organizations who took part in the fighting...'

Harel's article went on to
cite a report by the Israeli Military Intelligence and the Co-ordinator of
Israeli Government Activities in the [occupied] Territories, that claimed, 'only 288 [of the Palestinians killed in Gaza] were innocent
civilians.'

Meanwhile, the Palestinian
Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which is based in Gaza City, states that 1,285
Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops in Gaza during the recent offensive,
including 280 children, and that 83 per cent (or 1,062) of the total victims
were civilians.

There will always be major
discrepancies between Israeli and Palestinian data regarding the death toll in Gaza. But Amos Harel's quote from the Israeli Government
and Military Intelligence sources perfectly encapsulates their attitude towards
Palestinian civilians; 288 innocent civilians is clearly a more than acceptable
death toll when Israel is fighting 'terrorists.'

I spent this morning in the
company of an innocent Gazan civilian who lost three of his sons when his house
was bombed by the Israeli military during the offensive. Ziyad Il-Absi lives in
a refugee camp in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. On 28 December he was at
home with his wife, 'Efaf, his four sons and four daughters.

'The war had just started and
we were all frightened,' he told me. 'The bombing was intense, so I put my wife
and children together in one room. We all went to sleep in that room at about
10pm, except for my eldest son, Mahmoud, who was in another room.'

Three hours later, just
before 1am, an Israeli F16 airplane dropped a bomb on the Il-Absi house while
the family was sleeping. Ziyad Il-Absi woke up to find himself being flung across
his own house by the force of the explosion. 'All I knew was that the ceiling had
collapsed on top of me' he said.

His youngest son, four-year-old
Sidqi, was killed instantly, as was his 11-year-old son, Ahmed, whose mangled
body was found minutes later by neighbours. The body of 12-year-old Mohamed was
unearthed in the rubble of the yard outside the house. He had been flung metres
from his bed by the force of the bomb.

Mahmoud Il-Absi survived the
bombing because he had been in another room, slightly further from the centre
of the explosion. But Ziyad, his four daughters and his wife 'Efaf were all
injured. Ziyad spent several days in hospital, and his 15-year-old daughter, Zakia,
still needs reconstructive surgery on her left arm. But 'Efaf was critically
injured. On 11 January, she was transferred from Gaza
to a hospital in Egypt, where she remains in a coma. Ziyad cannot visit her in hospital
because he cannot secure a permit to cross the border into Egypt.

After he had told us his
story, Ziyad took us to see the ruins of his house. We climbed silently through
the shell where he and his family used to live, with its tattered bits of
clothes and shoes, toys and books wedged amidst the rubble. The room where the
family slept the night they were bombed was pulverized. There is nothing left
of it.

Ziyad doesn't know why his
family was targeted by Israel - and is still clearly stunned and traumatized by his
loss. He and I stood in the yard where the body of his son Mohamed was found.

'We are a family of
civilians' he told me. 'The Israelis killed my three sons and injured my four
daughters. They completely destroyed my house, my wife is now in a coma - and
they say we are terrorists.'

Salaam please follow WWW.GAZACONVOY.COM - it is a blog of a journey from the UK to Gaza by road with 150 vehicles filled with aid travelling to Gaza and also raising awareness for the Palistine issue as it travelles through Europe and Africa eventually reaching Gaza in approx 2 weeks time, please forward to all/

It's so ridiculous but typically US-style when one bomb a country because ’there's terrorists inside’. The US-approach of Israel is just dead-end. I'm from Vietnam, so this is pretty much like US soldiers call Vietnamese soldier guerillas, and be cause anyone can be a guerilla, they kill everyone, women, kids, old and young. I guess this apply to Palestinian people too.

’One of the wisest voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, writes that after an Israeli military victory [in 2009], ’What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.’

’There is good reason to believe that he is right. Israel is deliberately turning itself into one of the most hated countries in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long. Decades ago, I wrote that those who call themselves ’supporters of Israel’ are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction. Regrettably, that judgment looks more and more plausible.

’Meanwhile, we are quietly observing a rare event in history, what the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called ’politicide,’ the murder of a nation - at our hands.’ -page 124 of ’Gaza In Crisis - Reflections On Israel's War Against The Palestinians,’ by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé.

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The Gaza Blog

The Gaza blog is a weekly dispatch from the Gaza Strip. Louisa Waugh lives and works in Gaza, and her blogs capture the complexities and challenges of daily life under siege, amidst the aftermath of Israel’s devastating recent offensive.

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